There has been much buzz lately about the results from a study by McKinsey Global Institute, which estimated that knowledge worker productivity could potentially be increased with 20-25 percent with use of social technologies. Whether or not these figures are realistic or not, they point to the great potential for improving knowledge work and how social technologies can play a key role in unlocking that potential.
It's clear that to realize even a tiny bit of the potential hinted at in the study, we cannot continue being blinded by technology, putting technology first and people second. The failure of technology-centric approaches was recently illustrated by the findings of the 4th annual IT Adoption Insight Report produced by Oracle UPK together with Neochange. The study found that technology-centric organizations spend 2 to 3 times as much money on technology than organizations taking a more user-centric approach, yet the latter proved to be more profitable, indicating there is substantial ROI in becoming more user-centric.
The failure of the technology-centric approach to improving knowledge work is a major reason why new concepts such as “Digital Workplace” have a reason for existence. The Digital Workplace encourages us to take a more holistic approach when designing the digital work environment for an organization’s workforce. Rather than focusing on the individual solutions and tools such as intranet sites, collaboration tools, communication tools and productivity tools, we need to start with identifying the needs of the organization and its people and take a holistic approach to designing their digital workplace.
Questions such as “Should we replace our intranet with a social networking platform” are totally irrelevant and symptoms of technology-centric thinking that will be a sure path to failure. What we should think about instead is what capabilities a digital workplace needs to provide the organization and the people it should serve. These capabilities should be made available to people as services, designed to fit different usage situations, enabling them to get things done in the most efficient and effective way (see illustration below).
In this article I will highlight and take a closer look at six capabilities that should be the core of the digital workplace for many organizations.
1. Coordinating
Workspace awareness is about our ability to monitor and keep track of what’s happening at work: who is doing what, who is interacting with whom, whose turn it is to contribute, and so on. Having workspace awareness is essential if you are to coordinate your work with other people’s work.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that creating workspace awareness, and thus coordinating work, becomes a challenge in a distributed and complex work environment. At the same time, the need for effective coordination among different teams becomes increasingly important as the interdependencies between teams as well as the pace of change increase.
The problem is that many current digital work environments primarily have been designed for personal productivity, focusing on supporting individual tasks and less on the coordination of tasks and fundamentals such as creating workspace awareness. Ironically this has contributed to making people less productive and feeling isolated and disengaged.
What is lacking in most digital work environments is a really intelligent system that helps people quickly build workspace awareness and makes work visible. To help individuals and teams create workspace awareness that simplifies coordination, awareness tools such as activity streams can be introduced. Besides signaling to people so they know when it is their time to contribute, an activity stream can help them discover relevant information and external dependencies that they need to be aware off.
In other words, an activity stream can help to reduce workplace uncertainty so that people can make the required decisions and take action. Activity streams can also help to decrease workplace isolation. In a large and dispersed workforce, awareness tools can help bring people closer to each other and make them feel less isolated.
2. Finding People
"At the very least, our systems should help us find each other"
— Ross Mayfield, founder of SocialText
Finding the right people is one of the most common needs in organizations and sometimes a very difficult task in a big organization. The bigger and more distributed an organization gets, the harder it is to know who is working for the same organization, what they know and what, how and where they could contribute.
The first step in getting to know someone and building a relationship is to be aware about that person's existence. This makes discovery tools important. If our systems can help us discover other people we could benefit from knowing about, maybe because they share a common interest with us or possess a skill that we might be in need of, chances are we will get much better at matching the right person for the right job. Doing so is a key to success in a business. Otherwise they might be wasting their talent and skills on something they are not suited for, and you might miss out on having person on your project that could be the difference between your team's success and failure.
Rich profiles are necessary components in solutions for finding and discovering people. Rich profiles give employees the ability to create an online presentation of themselves and their skills, interests, education, memberships and so forth. At the very least, a rich profile should include a photo of each employee.
The importance of a simple thing like adding a photo of yourself so that colleagues who don’t know you can put a face to your name cannot be stressed enough. For one thing, the photo will make it easier to remember your name and seeing the individual behind the name. You will become familiar to them, making it easier for you to have textual conversations.
3. Networking
In their research paper “Productivity Effects of Information Diffusion in Networks,” Aral, Brynjolfsson and Van Alstyne showed that people's social networks are very important to the information system in an organization as their networks “strongly influence information diffusion … and access to novel information.”
Information diffusion in organizations follows the structure of our relationships with each other, and having access to the right tools for building and maintaining relationships as well as for disseminating information through our social networks can have significant impact on the effectiveness of an organization’s information system.
An MIT study from 2009 by A. Pentland (pdf) showed that employees with the most extensive digital networks are 7 percent more productive than their colleagues. Another study from 2009, sponsored by NEHRA and Partnering Resources, set out to answer the question of whether or not networking actually makes a difference for the success or failure of change initiatives. The study found that 73 percent of the least successful change initiatives were led by people described as having moderate or weak personal networks, and that 93 percent of the successful change initiatives were led by leaders with strong or very strong personal networks.
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Source : cmswire[dot]com
